All The King'S Men (Penguin Modern Classics)

All the King's Men is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey 'Kingfish' Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success. Review: PRAISE FOR "ALL THE KING'S MEN" "Over the course of more than two centuries of vivid political history, there is perhaps only one full-blooded American novel of politics that plunges deep into the hearts of its characters and therefore into the hearts of its readers, thus rising to the top ranks of American fiction. That is Robert Penn Warren's lush "All the King's Men,""--"Los Angeles Times Book Review" "It's a measure of the enduring worth of "All the King's Men" that Willie Stark has entered our collective literary consciousness, in the company of Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, Rabbit Angstrom, and very few others."--Joyce Carol Oates, "The New York Review of Books" Author Biography: Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. In his lifetime he won three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Medal for Literature, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1986 he was named the country's first Poet Laureate.